Kendall Jenner Takes on Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic in New Performance Art Video

Gigi Hadid co-stars.

Kendal and Gigi as Ulay and Marina. Courtesy W Magazine.

The world didn’t need another reason to love Kendall Jenner, but she went ahead and gave us one anyway.

In a newly-released video for W Magazine, the model and celebrity takes the audience on an abbreviated tour of performance art.

The humorous video, which runs a little over two and half minutes, opens with Jenner offering a cursory review of five artists whose works she later recreates.

Kendall Jenner as one of Yves Klein's Anthropométrie models. Courtesy W Magazine.

Kendall Jenner as one of Yves Klein’s Anthropométrie models. Courtesy W Magazine.

“When you’re a model, you’re a mannequin for other people,” Jenner explains between frames of her fixing her hair. “I want to be the director of my own vision now.”

Her subsequent homages to Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, Murakami Saburo’s Passing Through, and Relation in Time by Marina Abramovic and Ulay (which features her friend Gigi Hadid) entertain and delight.

Kendall Jenner as Yoko Ono in "Cut PIece." Courtesy W Magazine.

Kendall Jenner as Yoko Ono in “Cut PIece.” Courtesy W Magazine.

This isn’t just a celebrity venture, though. Performa’s founder RoseLee Goldberg lends her voice for the video’s introduction.

In another project for W Magazine called “Placebo Pets,” which was produced by contemporary artists Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin (both rising stars in the realm of performance art) for the magazine’s 10th anniversary art issue, Jenner and Hadid appear as “super friendly, domesticated humanoid pets” to underscore what the artists identify as society’s preoccupation with surveillance and stardom.

“We created social media, but then it changed us because we interacted with it,” Trecartin explained in a statement. “It transforms us and transforms the next thing that happens just by existing. You can’t really avoid being trained.”

Jenner’s parody-performance in this video certainly amuses, and if her closing remarks are anything to go by, fans may soon see a debut act of her own called “Selfie.” Hey, the instinct obviously runs in the family.


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